Andrea Davidson
999734006
“O Fortuna” Requoted: the Changeable Fame of the Songs of Beuern
November 15, 2012
‘O Fortune, changeable like the moon, how your wheel turns: sometimes giving fame,
sometimes obscurity.’1 How different this apostrophe sounds when put to the words, “O
Fortuna, / velut luna”2: these words must be sung, loudly and epically, as Carl Orff composed
them in his 1936 ‘scenic cantata,’ the Carmina Burana.3 The text, however, is centuries older
than that, and to many before Orff would have been better known as the thirteenth-century codex
from Benediktbeuern, Bavaria, called the Codex Buranus.4 The miscellaneous assortment of
Latin and Old German lyrics, poems, religious plays, and bawdy or drinking songs compiled in
this unusual codex was requoted by Orff, and by many other composers and poets, in a tradition
only begun more than six hundred years after its creation in 1230.5 Indeed, Fortune has given
the Carmina Burana both fame and obscurity, though perhaps her latest donation has been fame
in obscurity, since the original meaning, purpose, and context of the codex have been replaced by
those of the better known Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff.
The original meaning and purpose of the Codex Buranus, like much of medieval history,
are uncertain, though more accessible when placed in context. The contents of the Codex were
1
Translated from the original text of the Carmina Burana, provided in George Whicher, Goliard Poets:
Medieval Latin Songs & Satires (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1949), 263.
2
“O Fortuna,”Carmina Burana: the original text is placed alongside its translation in Whicher, 262.
3
Eric Friesen, “Carmina Burana: The Big Mac of Classical Music?,” Queen’s Quarterly 118.2 (Summer 2011):
283, accessed October 18, 2012, http://go.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA2
63521607 &v=2.1&u=utoronto_main&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w.
4
Although its first translator, Johann Andreas Schmeller, bestowed on it the name Carmina Burana, or Songs of
Beuern, in 1847, it is more traditionally and conveniently known as the Codex Buranus, or the Codex of Beuern.
5
Marisa Galvez, “Paradigms: The Carmina Burana and the Libro de buen amor,” in Songbook: How Lyrics
Became Poetry in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2012), 18 and 24. Music
historian Jack Stein suggests that the Codex was compiled even earlier, but since Galvez’s book is the most recent, I
have selected her putative date: 1230. Jack Stein, “Carmina Burana and Carl Orff,” Monatshefte 69.2 (Summer
1977): 129, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30156812.
Davidson 2
probably first written and performed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, simultaneous with
the first universities’ emergence.6 Linked to this phenomenon was the elaboration of an
ecclesiastical bureaucracy, for as church demanded more Latin-literate employees to draft and
circulate a standard canon law, more institutions began offering the necessary training.7
Students’ careers were thus virtually guaranteed, and so became more numerous, more
ambitious, and more confident – hence the appearance of an itinerant,8 cynical, and rambunctious
student culture, to produce the songs of the Codex Buranus.9 The carnality of the Codex’s love
poems,10 cynicism of its ecclesiastical allusions,11 and forthrightness of its drinking songs were
controversial in society, as was the very lifestyle of its authors.12
The contents of these poems, besides the explicitly sexual or irreverent, reflect the
student-poets’ classical education as well as their social concerns, for along with the criticisms of
the church’s and society’s hypocrisies – ironic, of course, because the students themselves were
preparing to ascend the hierarchies which they criticised13 – are allusions to Ovid, Epicurus, and,
of course, the Song of Songs.14 Just as this anthology, in its erudition, conflates sacred with
profane, so too Christian and pagan: in historian Anne Duggan’s words, “the goddess Venus
could be assimilated to the Virgin Mary, and Blanchefleur…could be invoked beside Helen of
Troy.”15 The poems’ lyrics also indicate the value universities placed not only on classical
literacy, but on students’ Latin composition abilities – after all, the anonymous poets featured in
Anne J. Duggan, “The World of the Carmina Burana,” in The Carmina Burana: Four Essays,” edited by Martin
H. Jones (London: King’s College, London, Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies, 2000), 2.
7
Duggan, 14.
8
Duggan, 3.
9
Duggan, 11.
10
Whicher, 161.
11
Duggan, 15.
12
Whicher, 3.
13
Duggan, 17.
14
Duggan, 13.
15
Duggan, 13. Blanchefleur was the heroine of a contemporary vernacular romance Floire et Blancheflor.
6
Davidson 3
the Codex applied their Latin skills beyond the classroom, and to the trysting glade or tavern!16
The songbook’s historical significance thus extends far beyond its fascinating contents, for the
Codex Buranus is a testament to both the thirteenth-century social climate and the student culture
– which included learning, carousing, and criticizing – that punctuated it.17
The codex was, nevertheless, unusual. In historian Julia Walworth’s words, “[it] appears
to have neither followed nor initiated a tradition,”18 for the Codex Buranus is unlike any other
extant thirteenth-century anthology, because its poems are all anonymous, and their thematic
groupings largely unrelated to each other.19 Moreover, the codex itself is decadently illustrated,
as though commissioned for some reason other than practical use,20 whereas contemporary
songbooks were generally cruder and intended to be used.21 In spite of the apparent worth
ascribed to the codex, however, its value seems to have diminished quickly, since it was stored
uncatalogued in Benediktbeuern’s monastery until 1803 – rendering it what historian George
Whicher has called “an under-the-counter book.”22 Whether or not the codex was as
controversial as Whicher suggests, or as controversial as the student culture that produced it,
became irrelevant until it was rediscovered in 1803, and first transcribed in 1847 by Johann
Andreas Schmeller:23 Fortune’s wheel – “velut luna” – had turned for the Codex, and the songs
of Beuern again were widely available, as they had not been since the thirteenth century.
16
Duggan, 12; Galvez, 37.
Duggan, 12.
18
Julia Walworth, “Earthly Delights: the Pictorial Images of the Carmina Burana Manuscript,” in The Carmina
Burana: Four Essays, edited by Martin H. Jones (London: King’s College, London, Centre for Late Antique &
Medieval Studies, 2000), 71.
19
Galvez, 17.
20
Walworth, 71.
21
Galvez, 35.
22
Whicher, 141.
23
Stein, 129. Schmeller bestowed the name “Carmina Burana” (“songs of Beuern”) in 1847, and the Codex
Buranus has been popularly called this ever since.
17
Davidson 4
The tradition of transcribing of the Codex was to persist, with each transcription building
on its precedents and improving in accuracy,24 and has been complemented by poets’ own
unique way of requoting: translations. George Whicher, whose translation of the Codex Buranus
was published in 1949, opted to follow the originals’ stanza structure, but introduced his own
rhyme scheme, altering the original metrical rhythm, and often censored his language, for his
goal must have been bowdlerised aestheticism.25 In marked contrast, Canadian poet Catriona
Strang’s 1993 translation, Low Fancies, as the title implies, is aggressively explicit, but also
literarily innovative, as the original Latin meter gives way to Strang’s own unstructured free
verse, or even abstract illustrations, but still conveys a tone similar to that of the thirteenthcentury student-poets.26 Perhaps Strang requoted the Codex to exercise her own artistry, rather
than replicate the originals. Another translator, David Parlett, aimed to produce an English
version that was singable to Carl Orff’s famous melodies in the Carmina Burana; this indicates
how Orff’s musical requotation has eclipsed the original textual meaning of the Codex.27 Music
has, however, always been associated with the Codex, both as inscrutable medieval neumes,28
and as musical, as well as textual, requotations.
The intertextuality of these musical requotations, that is, how or whether they requote
each other, is an important decision for their composers, for every piece of music entitled
Carmina Burana after Orff’s is either a quotation of Orff – this has been done in film scores,
flashmobs,29 and even a Michael Jackson music video30 – or a pointedly different-sounding
24
Stein, 122.
Whicher, 141-280.
26
Catriona Strang, Low Fancies (Toronto: ECW Press, 1993).
27
David Parlett, “Selections from the Carmina Burana, a verse translation by David Parlett,” on David Parlett’s
personal website, accessed November 10, 2012, http://www.davidparlett.co.uk/cburana/index.html.
28
Stein, 123.
29
“Flashmob Carmina Burana,” YouTube video, 4:12, from a flashmob by the Vienna Volksoper choir and
orchestra, posted by “unsereOEBB,” June 4, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJNp5UKRtbQ. Performed
in a train station by the Vienna Volksoper choir and orchestra, this is only one of many “O Fortuna” flashmobs.
25
Davidson 5
piece. For instance, the German band Corvus Corax composed a full-length opera inspired by
the text of the Codex, called the Cantus Buranus.31 Although the band’s idea of visually
accompanying the sung text with costumed dancers is like Orff’s, their sound’s mystical
polyphony is consciously distinguishable from Orff’s rhythmically-driven melodies. Aside from
Corvus Corax, musical requotations of the Codex tend to echo the sounds of medieval music,32
as does Austrian composer René Clemencic’s 1992 recording, which so deliberately deviates
from Orff’s music that its Gregorian chant replication has hardly any rhythm at all, and often the
music breaks off altogether so the soloists can simply recite the lyrics.33 Sounding equally
medieval, Philip Pickett’s 2000 recording is largely a cappella – markedly unlike Orff’s fullbodied sound – and seems consequently very liturgical.34 It is ironic that these recordings of
thirteenth-century students’ carousing songs sound so religious, though it seems that only Carl
Orff himself recognised that irony.
Orff’s Carmina Burana indeed embraces irony, but the way in which it deals with the
ironies of its lyrics is singular.35 Aside from the opening and closing invocations of Fortuna, the
scenic cantata is best known for its third section, which opens with the tenor’s ridiculous falsetto
rendering of “Olim Lacus Colueram,” a poem that gives a swan’s perspective on a roasting spit,
and continues with “In Taberna Quando Sumus,” a drinking song driven by parodic rhythm and
“Michael Jackson: Carmina Burana,” YouTube video, 4:16, a music video composed of footage from
Jackson’s “HIStory World Tour,” September 7, 1996 to October 15, 1997, posted by “TheMoonwalkerdu13,”
December 20, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPJmI8JKWbo.
31
“Corvus Corax – Cantus Buranus (Full Live Performance),” YouTube video, 1:23:09, from the band’s DVD of
this opera’s 2005 live performance, posted by “Seth0987,” February 4, 2012,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1YShYGk_6o. Corvus Corax (“Common Raven”) is a German band that
writes and performs Neo-Medieval music for a bagpipe-led orchestra, which – like this impressive opera – combines
traditional incantatory medieval sounds with those of contemporary music. Their music and costuming defy genre.
32
Stein, 124.
33
René Clemencic, Carmina Burana, Clemencic Consort, Oehms Classics, 1992. Clemencic claims, on the CD
cover, that his is the “original” version of the Carmina Burana, though scholars are still deciphering the musical
neumes accompanying some of the poems, and still have little certainty as to how the originals sounded. Stein,123.
34
Philip Pickett, Carmina Burana, New London Consort, Decca Records, 2000.
35
Music historian Jack Stein, nevertheless, calls Orff’s Carmina Burana nothing less than ‘iconoclasm’ in his
study of the musical innovation of the scenic cantata. Stein, 129.
30
Davidson 6
singable melodies, complemented by the solemnly-liturgical movement “Ego Sum Abbas
Cucaniensis,” all about an abbot who justifies his drinking as an act of piety.36 In musically
requoting these farcical lyrics, Orff maintained their overt irony, and so preserved the original
tone of these selections in the Codex Buranus. To further assert the tonal irony of his oeuvre,
Orff even ridiculed poems not intended in the thirteenth century to be ironic: for instance, he had
“Stetit Puella,” a salacious ditty about a seductive lady, sung demurely by a soprano, rather than
by the lustful male voices that certainly authored the lyrics.37 Orff’s interaction with the original
text employs the same lighthearted tone with which the songs of Beuern were originally written.
Orff could so permissibly parody the parodies of thirteenth-century student culture
because his Carmina Burana were written and set to music with a very different intent from the
student-poets’, who, when they were not criticising society, were reveling in, as Anne Duggan
phrased it, the “preoccupations of youth.”38 Orff’s Carmina, meant to be performed by a choir
of 200 and orchestra of 100,39 and accompanied with elaborate sets and costumed dancers,40 far
surpassed the medieval tavern culture – that is, culture produced in and for the frequenters of
taverns – that generated its lyrics,41 for the great joke of the Codex is that its authors could
display their erudition out of context, and thus parody their education by applying it to satire and
satyr verses. This difference between the original and the requotation heightens the parody
Orff’s achieves, and ironically also elevates the poems from their low-class beginnings to highclass sophistication. Orff could not, however, excuse the contents of the Carmina Burana as
easily as he could, with his deployment of irony, their context.
36
Music: Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, Decca Records, 1984. Text: in Whicher, 250-251; in Whicher, 226-229.
Commentary: Stein, 126-127.
37
Music: Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, Decca Records, 1984. Text: in Whicher, 220.
38
Duggan, 12.
39
Friesen, 283.
40
Stein, 122.
41
Whicher, 4; Galvez, 22.
Davidson 7
Orff wrote his Carmina Burana in 1935, in Nazi Germany – within a socio-political
context positively alien to that of the thirteenth-century student-poets. It would have been
politically subversive to value any artistic tradition besides the Nazis’ own, and by glorifying the
pan-European university culture of the Middle Ages in the Carmina, Orff seemed to perpetrate
that attitude: the composer was duly, at first, criticised.42 Moreover, the profligacy advocated by
the medieval lyrics seemed to snub Nazi social expectations, and the very articulation of that
profligate Epicureanism – sexually explicit and indifferent to authority – was anathema.43 The
punishment that could Orff could have received because of the Carmina – but did not – might be
likened to the intellectual reception of the songs of the Codex Buranus. Their student-poet
writers were labeled ‘Goliards,’ a derogative term that may have associated the allegedlyheretical theologian Abelard and his disciples with Goliath and the Philistines.44 The studentpoets of the Codex have commonly been associated with the Goliards because of the bad
reputation that they accrued for their criticisms of the reforming ecclesiastical bureaucracy. In
spite of this parallel between the contexts in which both the Codex and the Carmina were
written, Orff’s requotation, unlike the original, was spared lasting denigration because of the
obscurity of its Latin and Old German lyrics – another significant change in German society over
the seven hundred years between the Goliard poets and the Carmina.
Only when it was translated was the text of the Carmina was only offensive to the Nazi
Party, since by the twentieth century, its languages were largely inaccessible.45 For the educated,
then, the Carmina was what music journalist Eric Friesen has called “deliciously subversive” –
though not so subversive as to be considered a threat to the socio-political organization of Nazi
42
Michael H. Kater, “Carl Orff,” Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 123.
43
Kater, 123.
44
Whicher, 3.
45
Kater, 123-124.
Davidson 8
Germany,46 since the popularity of the Carmina Burana was then, as it is today, due to its
musical puissance, not its intellectual humour.47 The meaning of the poems of the Codex
Buranus, arcane by the time that they were resurrected, or requoted, came to be replaced by the
music to which they were more famously set, and still is today. This obscurity of the text in
favour of its music’s fame is perhaps epitomised by the recent online publication of a video that
plays Orff’s “O Fortuna” with nonsense subtitles of English words that sound like the Latin of
the text,48 demonstrating an ignorance not only of Latin but also of the original purpose and
meaning of the songs of Beuern, not as Orff’s risible masterpiece but as thirteenth-century
students’ poems collected in the Codex Buranus. Thus, because of Orff’s renowned requotation
of the Codex Buranus, the original meaning of the poems and their anthology has remained in
the obscurity it endured whilst sitting for centuries unregistered in the Benediktbeuern monastic
library.
Fortune has shown the songs of Beuern, compiled as the Codex Buranus around 1230 and
composed most famously in 1936, to have endured all positions of her rotating wheel. As the
roasting swan laments – of course, always in a tenor’s falsetto, ever since Orff made it so – in
“Olim Lacus Colueram,” “girat, regirat furcifer.”49 After the twelfth- and thirteenth-century
fame of the songs of Beuern, resulting in their being recorded in the valuable Codex Buranus by
that unknown but prescient patron, they were lost for six centuries, then rediscovered and
immediately requoted – in transcriptions, translations, and musical settings. Having ascended to
46
Friesen, 281.
Kater, 125. Indeed, the Carmina Burana became so popular in Nazi Germany that it was performed six times
during the Second World War, and Orff became, in historian Michael Kater’s words, “something of an icon in the
cultural establishment” of the “New Germany,” and enjoyed the particular protection of high-ranking Nazi Party
members. Kater, 131 and 126. Orff spent the rest of his life, after the fall of Nazi Germany, trying to erase that
reputation for the sake of his own and that of his music. Kater, 125.
48
“O Fortuna Misheard Lyrics,” YouTube video, 2:38, posted by “FamishedMammal,” May 11, 2012,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8. The song begins with the exclamation “GOPHER TUNA!”
49
“Olim Lacus Colueram,” Carmina Burana, in Whicher, 250. Translation: “the scoundrel [the cook] turns and
turns [the spit].”
47
Davidson 9
and fallen from the acme of Fortune’s wheel before being discovered by Carl Orff, the songs
reached the top once more after their most famous requotation in the Carmina Burana. In spite
of this, the actual text of the Codex’s poems still is largely unknown, since their meaning has
been eclipsed by Orff’s music. Fame despite obscurity – fame in obscurity, or obscurity in fame
– is the latest fortune bestowed on the songs of Beuern. It seems, however, that the songs’
writers, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century anonymous student-poets, were resigned to this all
along, for it was one among them who wrote,
“O Fortuna,
velut luna
statu variabilis”50 –
though when they did so they certainly did not sing the words, as one must do today, to the tune
of Carl Orff’s far more renowned requotation.
This is an excellent paper. It shows off your ability to write and reason clearly, and to
follow the convention of academic essay composition and referencing. If anything would
have improved it in the context of this course, it would have been a little more attention to
requites after Orff, and perhaps some more commentary on the relationship between
original and reproduction – in speaking about the “real” text as the original you are not
being very postmodern, which is fine, but might use some defending.
“O Fortuna,” Carmina Burana, in Whicher, 262. Translation: “O Fortune, just like the moon, you are always
changing our status.”
50
Davidson 10
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